The joyful noise you hear emerging from the Toronto Fringe this year is the sound of a glass ceiling being shattered.

Let’s face it, despite recent improvements, most of Toronto’s theatres are still one-man bands, with the emphasis on “man.”

But at the Toronto Fringe festival, thanks to the gender-blind equality built into its lottery system of choosing plays, this year you can discover a whole array of women making their own kind of music, with political farce, religious satire, rock fairy tales, social fables and autobiographical drama.

“Sure, it’s still a world where the guys call most of the shots,” says the outspoken Kat Sandler, whose dystopian prohibition saga We Are the Bomb starts performances at The Paddock (178 Bathurst St.) on July 3. “But I just try to ignore it, which I’ve been doing all my life.”

Sandler, 27, founded Theatre Brouhaha, a company that she says does “plays about love, sex and money that don’t last longer than an hour.”

We Are The Bomb is about a group of devoted drinkers who, on the eve of a new prohibition act in Canada, decide to name their favourite bar a separate country.

“It’s a nice mix of politics and farce, with a really dark edge,” Sandler says. “And if you can’t do that at the Fringe, then where can you do it?”

Rosamund Small is the 22-year-old author of Genesis and Other Stories, being presented at Trinity St. Paul’s Chapel (427 Bloor St. W.) starting on July 3.

She may seem every bit as shy and retiring as Sandler is flamboyant, but the work she’s presenting has its own distinct voice.

“It’s about people who slave away at theatre and religion with the same mad passion and the same mixed results,” is how she dryly describes it, admitting she’s combined the two in her own life for years.

“My parents didn’t take to me church when I was young, but we kinda did Jesus stuff around the big holidays. And my mom always took me to things like musicals and Noel Coward plays. I guess the two started to get mixed up in my mind.

“So when I hit puberty, I decided I wanted to go to Sunday school because I craved the ritual and the order I thought it would bring into my life. Well, it didn’t, but I learned a lot of Bible stories and actually started to write a version of this show when I was in high school.”

It was through Toronto’s Paprika Festival, which features young artists, that Small first developed this work. She’s grateful to go from there to a major Fringe show at an age when most people are still juggling career options.

“Where else could you do this but at the Fringe? They don’t want to know how old you are, they just draw your name and suddenly you’re a part of it. And I think it’s a real honour to be part of a thing that’s so massive.”

Sometimes that honour comes in just under the wire, as Suzanne Roberts Smith recently learned. The Toronto resident, 32, was on the waiting list for the Fringe but thought her chances had evaporated when suddenly, a few weeks ago, someone dropped out and she was asked to take their place.

“I’ve been told I’m the latest person to step up in the whole 25-year history of the Fringe, which gives you pause,” says the statuesque Smith.

After throwing out a childhood fantasy “of being the first woman in major league baseball,” she went through the Etobicoke School of the Arts, the National Theatre School and Stratford’s Birmingham Conservatory for classical training.

But all of that preparation didn’t guarantee employment, which is why Smith is so grateful for the chance the Fringe has given her.

“I love the Fringe for so many reasons. I love that anything can happen here. I love the fact it’s where theatre pushes the boundaries. And I love the chance, the lottery system.”

Smith is performing in Berni Stapleton’s black comedy Offensive to Some, which is about an abused wife who finally kills the man ruining her life. It’s being presented at the Annex Theatre (730 Bathurst St.), starting on July 5.

Sara Farb has written the book and Colleen Dauncey the music for a road-trip musical with a cast of rockin’ animals called Bremen Rock City, which opens at the Palmerston Library Theatre (560 Palmerston Ave.) on July 4. (Akiva Romer-Segal is their lyrical collaborator.)

Farb is currently playing Jessica in The Merchant of Venice at the Stratford Festival. She’s enthusiastic about the Fringe’s ability “to take young artists like me and Colleen and Akiva and help us get better known as authors.”

“I’ve been performing since I appeared in Jane Eyre at the Royal Alex when I was 9, but writing is a much harder field to crack. I think what’s great about the Fringe is that it offers the opportunity to do anything you want to anyone who is lucky enough to get in.”

Dauncey couldn’t agree more.

“As an indie theatre creator, I wait for the Fringe all year. I get so inspired by what other people have done and by the sheer fact that they’re here for no other reason than they got picked.

“Akiva and I don’t write conventional musical theatre and some people’s ears are closed to our stuff. But at the Fringe, you don’t have to worry about any of that. Your work stands on its own. That’s what so exciting.”

The sheer randomness of the Fringe can break a glass ceiling for some people or find a new audience for others, but for Julie Brar it was a lifesaver.

Brar’s show is called The Very Very Girl (the Annex Theatre, beginning July 5) and it tells her true story. She left her strict Sikh family in Winnipeg at the age of 15 and eventually wound up supporting herself by working as a stripper.

“It took me a long, long time to be ready to talk about it, but I finally came into my own, as a person, as a woman and as a storyteller.”

Her husband, Kim Feraday, helped her find the strength to tell it: he “empowered me to take control of that part of my life and not judge myself.”

With his support, Brar wrote the first draft of the play. Then, last September, he died suddenly.

“I was devastated. I couldn’t sleep or think. I did not know what would happen to me.”

Some friends suggested she submit her script to the Fringe lottery and made her go to the public announcement in November, the first night she had ventured out since his death. Her play was one of those chosen at random.

“I am so grateful to the Fringe. It helps many people in many ways, but it’s allowed me to channel my grief in a way that’s possible to deal with.”

Some people attack the lottery system that the Fringe uses to choose their plays, but Smith says, “I think the Fringe is so important because the usual kind of industry favouritism can’t happen here. You’re here because of chance, not because of your gender, or your age or who you know in the business.”

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